Muscle & Bone
by scillio
Summary: Just another super normal summer home from college. No one's sending you on a deranged manhunt or anything. Womanhunt? Well. The main word here is hunt.
1. Chapter 1

You know as well as anybody that Tim Shepard is fucked up. There always was an edge of crazy to his cool, but Curly's death in Vietnam pushed him over the line. It took him exactly one week to torpedo the little empire he'd built over the years and get a job in the stockroom of a discount department store, and it took him exactly six hours to lose that job by stabbing Two-Bit Mathews in the Junior Misses department.

Two-Bit was in the Junior Misses department because he had grown weary of waiting in the car for his little sister to pick out some back-to-school blouses and decided to harass her along. No one knew why Tim was in the Junior Misses department, because he was supposed to be unpacking boxes in the back; but there he was, and Two-Bit made one or two (Two-Bit told you, which means five or six in reality) jesting remarks about it, and Tim grinned briefly and then stabbed him in the shoulder. Two-Bit went down, Anita Mathews clocked Tim with a clothes hanger, and the Shepard reign over the stockroom of Doogan's Discount Special came to a close.

Two-Bit did not press charges.

"Look, we both know me and Shepard weren't gonna get through our entire lives without one of us stabbing the other," he told you over the phone, sounding much too blithe for someone whose stitches were two hours old. "No hard feelings, you know?"

You definitely did not know, but you also did not feel up to saying that out loud. So instead you asked about the store and the manager and how Anita was, and all the while you could see your finger winding the cord of the dorm phone tighter and tighter, and all the while you could see a boy lying still in a pool of moonlight and a fountain flowing gently behind him.

(When you remember, there's never any blood.)

The store manager also did not press charges, probably out of an solid sense of self-preservation, and so Tim Shepard is as free as he ever was to wreak whatever havoc he desires.

The havoc he desires is evidently somewhere in Rolly's Bar tonight, which is unfortunate for you, because Annie has set up camp at the table in the corner and she's your only chance at a ride tonight, in more ways than one. (Is this a gross thing to think? Possibly; and yet Annie is always making jokes about riding you, so it seems fair.)

Tim has staked a claim at the bar, ordered a single beer, and not touched it in two hours. So far no one has tried to talk to him, but you don't need hard evidence to tell that anyone who did would get the freeze out at best.

You get that. His brother died two months ago, and he wasn't exactly the friendliest kitten in the box before that. He looks like shit. He looks like he's going to fall asleep. He looks like he's going to wreck somebody.

He looks fucked up.

But you're not thinking about that; you're thinking about Annie, because Annie is right in front of you and you're great at concentrating. You concentrated your way to a 3.6 GPA this semester, it is your second night back in Tulsa since Christmas, and you deserve (deserve?) a break. Annie is _good_ at breaks. That's not even an innuendo; Annie Nowak has a gift for repose that would make a Buddhist monk shriek with envy. Life is a sweet slow river and Annie is flat on her back on a raft; big brown eyes closed against the sunlight, bare feet trailing across cool water. If you concentrate you can smell the damp earth of the overhanging bank and see little roots reaching down and tangling beneath the surface. If you concentrate, it's the most beautiful place in the world.

But you're terrible at concentrating. And Rolly's is a truly magical place; any attempt to pretend you are not in it increases its noise exponentially. It smells like beer and smoke and sex and sorrow, all those things that are always mixed together in your mind. (In retrospect, you should not have lost your virginity in a parked car twenty yards from the intersection where your parents crashed and died. Yup, yep, retrospectively, you can nod and stroke your beard like a sorcerer in a play: ah, yes, a bad choice, young man. You're so good at retrospection. If you were a superhero, your name would be Retro-spectacular.)

Ok, so maybe the noise is grinding against you like one bone against another when the muscles and joints wear thin in between. Maybe not even Annie's soft hand on your spine is enough to make you forget that someone in this bar stabbed someone you love, and for some reason, some small and clearly unidentifiable reason, you have a big fucking problem with that.

What a mystery.

Annie leans in and her scent pulls you back into yourself in a way that words never could. She smells like sweat and cinnamon soap. You think about burying your nose in her neck, about the way her laugh would vibrate through you, but you don't do it.

She leans in until her long brown hair curtains down onto your shoulder. "Get me another drink?"

She whispers it like it's something naughty, or illegal, which strikes you as very funny, which was her whole purpose in doing it, so you laugh. Ha ha ha. You're a bubble in the air, Curtis. Life is a parade of mirth.

( _Pony's dr-unk_ , Irv singsonged to himself when he woke up to you throwing up in your shared trashcan the night Two-Bit called. This was not malicious on Irv's part; Irv is a soul free of malice, plus he was trashed himself and even if you could have found the words he was in no state to understand that you were suddenly five years younger and in a park, screaming. If you were a superhero your power would be time travel.)

You're not drunk now. You're feeling it, but you're not drunk. Rolly's is always like that.

The waitress is the mother of a girl you went to high school with, and also is sitting on the lap of a guy two tables over, making out like it's the last thing they'll ever do. (Maybe it is. NO, _shut up, shut the fuck up_ ) So you amble up to the bar and lean in a good two yards away from Shepard the First and try not to think about Curly. Try not to think about his dumb laugh and the time he was lucky enough to fall off that telephone pole, because he surely would have grabbed a wire and electrocuted himself to death if he'd made it to the top.

Think instead about how lucky you are that Soda made it back from Nam safely, that the curse that seemed like it was following your family from month to month like a mortgage has finally slipped off into the ether somewhere, and everyone is fine and happy, including you. Happy as a motherfucking clam. Two celebratory beers, please. One for Annie, one for her horse.

Tim's hand closes on your shoulder and you turn around and hit him as hard as you can. Head turns, fist cracks, the sound of bone hitting bone only slightly muted by the flesh between them. He doesn't go down. You're not surprised. Tim has been getting punched by adults since he was about ten. At twenty four he can probably take a beating with a bat and stay on his feet.

You wish you had a bat.

But you don't. All you have are those two dumb fists and enough rage to rival any Shepard on earth, like that'll do you any good.

"That's your free one," Tim says grimly as blood trickles down his chin and drips. He catches it before it hits the floor, and that's what fucks you up, that unexpected gesture, that desire to keep one more stain off the dirtiest floor in Tulsa. You rock back against the bar like he hit you.

He isn't going to hit you. You can tell just by looking at him. He just tells you to get moving and steers you out into the alley next to the bar, one hand on your shoulder the whole way. Fine. Now you're in a dark alley instead of a dark bar. Big deal.

You wait for him to run you up against the wall, his arm a bar against your neck, but he lets go and stands back and looks at you with those holes he calls eyes. Fuck, you could throw a penny in and you wouldn't hear it hit bottom. That's how deep and dark they are. That's how endless.

 _Sorry about your brother._

You open your mouth but nothing comes out. You can never say what you mean anymore. You used to be able to, when you were a kid.

"Got a question for you, Curtis," says Tim. He's not close to you, but you know better than to make any sudden movements.

Light from the street cuts a triangle into the alley, but neither of you are standing in it. Everything is greyscale where you're standing. When you put your hand at your side your fingers brush the metal lid of a trash can.

"Ok," you say. Brilliant.

"Where," says Tim, in a voice so quiet and soft and infinitely terrible that the hairs on the back of your neck rise up in response, "is my fuckin' sister?"

The bricks that rise up behind you dampen the sound you make, but you still make it and you still didn't mean to. Tim does not respond to that. Tim is a marble carving, one foot up on a stray board, one hand under his jacket where he keeps his gun.

"I don't know," you say honestly, not that you think it will help.

And ding ding ding, the prize goes to Pony! It indeed does not help. Tim draws his gun. Cocks it but doesn't point, just lets you see it, just lets himself feel the weight in his hand.

(Dally hands you a gun and a roll of bills. When you remember, it's not always you who takes them, but it's better that way. It's better that way.)

Suddenly your shoulder is burning, the imprint of Angela's kiss coming back to haunt you. You don't have to tell Tim you were with her last night. It is eminently clear that he knows.

"No one's seen her?" you ask the gun, because it's better to look at something realer than Tim's glassy eyes.

Tim wags the gun back and forth slightly like he's shaking his head no. Ever the comedian. Two-Bit was right. This town was never big enough for the both of them.

"I really don't know," you tell him, and look at his face.

His smile is so much worse than it used to be. So much worse than a glare or a frown. He smiles and fear spiders down your back and crawls around your torso and bites into your stomach with all its teeth.

"Well you were with her last, son," says Tim. "So you better find the fuck out."

And just like that, he puts the gun away. Holds up one finger. Smiles.

"You got one day, boy."

He saunters out into the streetlight, and the illumination makes you turn your head away. When you look back he's still there, standing right at the edge of the alley with his back toward you, crazy as hell and not afraid of anything.

He doesn't have to tell you he's going to kill you if you can't find her. You've always been the smartest kid in class.


	2. Chapter 2

Let us jaunt backwards, safe in the arms of Retro-Spectacular, Time-Traveling Dumbass, to the night before.

She came through the door like a storm on fire, and there you were at the desk, legs up, smoking one last cigar before calling it a night. The heat and the force blew you backwards until you were right up against the bones of the wall and she was right up against your leg with her fever-hot hand pressing down hard on your thigh. You knew she was trouble; all women are trouble, and she was all woman. She had hair and legs. She had hair on her legs.

Ok, all right, try it again. A touch more veracity, perhaps.

So:

First night back in Tulsa, you always go to the park. You don't know why.

(You know why.)

It is exactly the same as it was when you were a kid, probably exactly the same as it was fifty years ago and will be fifty years in the future. The jungle gym is still rusty, the fountain is still aggressively merry, the pavement is still unstained. You stand there in the dark and smoke a joint and try not to feel melodramatic, and you are unsuccessful. Big surprise.

(There are a thousand ways to do this. What if you don't do any? What if, at the entrance of the labyrinth, you stop and turn around instead of charging in?)

You take your shoes and socks off and step into the fountain.

It's so cold that your eyes close in relief, because even after midnight, the Oklahoma June is sweltering. The whole city catches fire every morning and the ashes smolder all damn night, thick and ugly in your throat every time you breathe in.

You are thinking about breathing, here in this fountain, and the alarming simplicity thereof. You are thinking about the sounds beneath the water and the silence above it. You are thinking about screaming.

But you don't. You keep your mouth shut and your hands open, bend down to touch the water. It's so cool between your fingers that it feels like a blessing. It feels like a gift.

Irony shoves you out of the fountain. You stumble over the edge onto warm concrete, and when you look up there she is, her own bare feet dragging in the dirt beneath the swing where she sits so perfectly still that you think you're dreaming. (When you dream, no one ever moves. Her hair would be carved in anthracite, stone still in the empty wind. Break off a piece and it crumbles. Blood drips onto your palm.) You can't look away. The moon is not out and all the streetlights here are broken. She sits in darkness.

 _Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire_ , goes that voice inside your head. Hush, hush. You walk toward her, still barefoot, because even now you don't think about things like broken glass on a playground.

You mean to say hello, or howdy or hey or _something_ in the realm of normal, but it comes out crooked and strange, it comes out:

"Are you all right?"

Her laugh is a moon within her, illuminating her shoulders and throat. Just for a second, half of a second, they flash white at you in the darkness. Your hand closes on the chain of the swing beside hers.

You never thought Angela was particularly pretty, just glass-eyed and jagged and mean, but in this moment here before you she looks like something out of a painless dream. And you wonder how someone with such short hair can look like a river goddess, mythic and Greek, like she just stepped out of a forest with leaves in her hands to beckon you into another time. You put your hand out without thinking, a response to an offer she has not made, and maybe this is a night for miracles, because she takes it.

Her palm is so callused that you look up in surprise.

"Mopping," she says, and pulls it away. The goddess flees wing-footed back into the woods, and suddenly there you are with Angela Shepard who has hated you since middle school, who works nights cleaning office buildings downtown. Who should at this moment be inhaling fumes and emptying trash cans and not looking up at you like you're the one who should not be here.

(Maybe you shouldn't.)

"Sorry," you say dumbly, like you dirtied the floors yourself. She rolls those iron eyes and there's that old smirk again, and you're in the hallway of Will Rogers with her laughter reverberating in your cherry-red ears. Oh, Retro-Spectacular. What if, just once, you used those powers for good?

Too late. Your ears are so hot it's a wonder they're not glowing, but hell, it's not like you can see them. Maybe they are.

Angela leans back in the swing and stares directly at you, and you find yourself sniffing the air like your childhood hound, searching for a whiff of alcohol around her, but you can't smell anything except hot concrete and rust. She's not drunk. She's just sitting there as silent and as still as she was when you were in the fountain, presumably watching with the same blatant intensity, and something about it makes you want to jump out of your skin and run until you can't breathe.

You could. You already held her hand. There are no rules to this. You are not fourteen and terrified of girls who smile mockingly when you look at their legs in their too-short skirts. You could turn around and walk away and probably never see Angela Shepard again, and who cares?

Who would care?

"Sorry about your brother," you say softly. Angela's hair, chin-length and curlier than Curly's ever was, slides down her cheeks as her head moves forward. She pushes back with her legs and begins to swing, changes her mind and checks the movement. Tilts her head upward and looks at you.

"Are you?" It is, believe it or not, the least malicious tone you have ever heard her use. It's soft and honest and _gentle_ and so far beyond strange that you sit down in the swing next to her and put your chin in your sweating hand.

"Yeah," you say honestly, without so much as a thought of being offended at the question. "Yeah, I really am."

"You look like shit," she says in that same gentle voice, and you really do. You know that. "You should go home."

You really should. But you know that too.

A soft wind kicks up, hot air over hot skin, and you wish you were in the fountain. Irony kicks you in the middle of the back and you swing forward, return, forward, return. Never actually going anywhere. How fitting.

Angela Shepard is burning. There is something inside her that vibrates at a frequency you cannot see, but oh, you can feel it. Sitting there next to her you can feel it, you can feel it down in between your ribs, down where you still feel things like that. And you want to ask again if she's okay and you know it's stupid and pointless and of course she's not okay, no one comes to the park at two in the morning if they're okay. Ah, there's the streetwise detective. Figured that one right the fuck out, huh?

"Sure you're all right?" you hear it before you realize you're going to say it, but there it is.

Angela turns her delicate head fully toward you, and you still yourself like it was a command. You sit so still you can hear your heartbeat. It sounds like waves in the distance.

"You ever think about Alaska?" she asks quietly. "All that snow, all the time? All that sunlight?"

"From what I've tasted of desire, I hold with those who favor fire." Frost again, you unoriginal fucker. It slips out without your permission, or at least your approval, and you find yourself glaring at Angela like it's her fault. Like she drew it out of you by magic.

Her eyelids lower and the perfect lines of her lips twist upward in a half-grimace, half-smirk that shouldn't strike you the way it does, but it might as well be a baseball coming over the plate at seventy five mph. You never were much good at this kind of thing.

"You thinkin' about fires, Curtis?" she drawls, laughing and half-lidded, a trickster goddess in the forest. Snap your fingers and you wake up in a pile of briars. Close your eyes and it's winter.

She swings sideways and brushes her lips against your shoulder; swings away again, laughing. And shit, maybe Frost wasn't such a bad idea after all.

"I ain't gonna fuck you," says Angela.

In your mind, leaves rustle and a pair of eyes blink out at you behind them. In your body, your feet scrape ruts into the dirt beneath you.

"All right," you say, ears lit up like a Christmas tree. Somewhere, all the other reindeer are making it a point to exclude you.

"I ain't gonna fuck you," she repeats, a hint of humor in it now that you didn't catch before. "But I'll go get a drink. You want to go get a drink, Ponyboy?"

It's the way she says your name that does it. It's the downy feel of the little breeze on your fingertips and the total lack of anything hard or cold or sorry in the way her voice moves toward you. It's the moon coming out from behind the clouds for the first time in what feels like eons.

You hold out your hand. Angela takes it, and together you get up and walk off to retrieve your shoes.

...

* * *

You had a drink. Buck's was even stranger than you remembered, with Buck long dead and Bobby Darin, of all things, on the blaring radio. All the guys you used to know as the regulars are either in prison or Vietnam, all the girls married or gone. It was just a bunch of high school kids you didn't know, which made you feel like enough of a creep to high-tail it out of there after one beer. Angela did not follow. When you left, she was still dangling her legs off of a bar stool and radiating something indefinable into the space around her. She didn't watch you go.

And that's it.

So not much to go of off, is it, when it comes to finding a girl you didn't know was missing until her brother pointed a gun at you? Not much to even think about, alone here in the alley, except maybe going and hotwiring Annie's car so you can beat it out of town before the sun comes up. And how you'd have to come back eventually and Tim would be waiting, and your brothers would have to fish your lifeless ass up out of some ditch like an overgrown trout, white-eyed and swollen. What a catch.

Your eyes (still green) shut of their own accord, and instead of brick and trash and darkness there is Angela's white throat lit up from the inside, laughing. Your torso lurches like you're going to burst out into a run, like a shot just went off behind you and there's nothing but the harsh breathing of other runners and the smooth red track flying up before you.

You haven't run in six months.

Suddenly all that cheap beer from Rolly's tap is on top of you, and you're pushing your back into rough brick and trying not to throw up. Two-Bit is fine, Two-Bit is fine. Johnny is dead. Dallas is reincarnated as a junkyard dog somewhere in Mexico. Everything is normal and okay, and you're not going to throw up. You're not. Come on, Curtis. Come on, now. Use those dilapidated lungs for something other than cigarettes and _calm the fuck down._

 _Ok._

Here's what you know: there's a girl missing. You saw her last.

Here's what you can assume: Tim checked her house and her work and all the normal places she would be. There must have been some expected communication between them that didn't happen, or he wouldn't have been in this alley ten minutes ago.

Here's what you don't know: Whether Tim actually did any of those things, what with his new shift from Crazy Motherfucker to No, Actually Crazy Motherfucker and all. Whether Angela had plans to run away or kill herself, whether any of her friends would know. Whether she has any friends.

So, first things first (you maven of organization) you have to find someone who does know some of those things. Tim and Curly are out of the question, neither of your brothers would know, Two-Bit is still laid up, Steve's in Colorado with the army paying for his college. You can't think of a single girl who would know; you can't think of a single girl Angela Shepard spoke to in high school.

Well. You can think of one. And you can think of where she is. And you can think of all the reasons not to, but why fucking bother, really, when there is one pretty good reason in the forefront of your mind, and also you feel like you could actually run for the first time in a long, long time.

So gird your loins, fucker, and get those car keys while you can. It's time to go to the YWCA.


	3. Chapter 3

You pull up to the YWCA a little after midnight. Two women are smoking under a large sign that reads ELIMINATE RACISM in red block letters. They pretend not to watch you get out of Annie's car, but when you walk toward them they both turn sharply and size you up. The hair is different now, and the clothes are so wild it's almost impossible to tell who's from where, but you know your kind when you see them. Rich girls don't look at people like that.

So you forego the bullshit. "Y'all know Sylvia?"

The taller of the girls leans back against the wall. The top of her head just brushes the bottom of the L.

"There's three inside," she says. "Which one you lookin' for?"

"Herrero." Nope, that was her maiden name. Try again. "Shepard, I mean."

I'll get her," says the tall one. "Boys can't go in after midnight. Who should I tell her is outside?"

"Curtis," you say flatly, because you're not in the mood for the inevitable questions. She peels herself off the wall and goes inside, and the other one just folds her arms over her chest and watches you try not to make direct eye with her.

In your memory, Sylvia's hair is always brighter than it is in real life, always a burnished-golden-orange that catches every eye and declares her personality so definitively that she doesn't need to say a word. But when she comes out of the Y and into the square of light cast by the lamps hanging over the door, it's the same shade of sensible auburn that it's always been.

And you have to hand it to her, she looks the part of a Y manager, with a reserved blouse and jeans that flare out but somehow seem more serious than real bellbottoms. But when she sees you her expression morphs from guarded curiosity to something more amused. Amused with a touch of predatory. You don't know what the hell it is about you that makes the girls you grew up with look at you like that, but it certainly is the most effective way to piss you off. (Ok, so then you do know.)

By the time she walks up you're steaming. She seems to sense this, and grins. One of her front teeth got chipped when she fell off a seesaw as a kid, and it gives her smile a slightly feral edge.

"Curtis, now, Ponychild? Don't tell me-"

"Angela's missing," you say abruptly, grateful to have an excuse to cut her off.

This is evidently not news to her. "Mm. Had a visit from the tooth fairy, did you?"

You frown confusion at her.

Sylvia digs a loose cigarette out of her back pocket and looks at you expectantly for a light. You oblige, careful not to touch her hand while doing it.

"Don't know if you noticed this," says Sylvia, "but Tim's gone, to put it delicately, completely bonkers. He picks up people's teeth after he knocks 'em out now. Keeps 'em in a cigar box on his desk."

What does it say about you, exactly, that your first thought is: _Tim has a desk?_ He must have done some homework at some point in his life, after all. This may not be the revelation to focus on.

"Fuck," you say, a second too late, but Sylvia nods in agreement anyway. She has always reminded you of Lauren Bacall, beautiful in a rough, unusual way, and downright plain from some angles. And never giving a shit about either one. You find yourself staring up at the racism sign, and you pretend it's because you're wondering exactly how a coalition of Young Christian Women plans to eliminate racism in its entirety, but you know, and Sylvia knows, that it's really because you don't want to look at her. Not for more than a minute at a time.

"He told me you were with her last, so you probably have a better idea than me where she got to."

You can hear the smirk in her voice even if you can't quite look at her face, but you're too annoyed to turn red, which is a source of great satisfaction. Chalk one up for Ponychild.

"I don't," you snap, and then calibrate, because, you know, she's your only source and all.

You turn your voice conciliatory, but it veers off into complaint. "Tim didn't say much. Wants me to look for her, but didn't say shit. You know if he checked all her hangouts and boyfriends and all that?"

"He did. Their mom called when she didn't come home from work, and he spent all today huntin' her." She fixes you with a long look, and you can see the wheels turning as she muses on the fact that you and Angela didn't fuck last night.

"Hm," she says finally. "She say anything about runnin' off?"

"No. We hardly talked. One drink at Buck's and then I left."

"She stayed?"

"Yeah."

"Curiouser and curiouser," Sylvia says around her cigarette.

You only blink twice, but that's all it takes. She removes the cigarette and smirks, and you know you're in for it.

"Ponyboy Curtis," she says slowly, softly. "I keep thinkin' you'll grow out of thinkin' you're the only person on earth who reads books. Most people evolve, you know. But you seem a little, shall we say, stuck."

And it should make you embarrassed or mad or ashamed but all you can think of is Dallas sneering and bristling, eyes lit up at the prospect of a fight. Dallas, who loved nothing more than a brawl, and therefore loved Sylvia like he'd never loved anything else. If there is a word to sum up Sylvia Shepard it is incisive, and God, did Dallas love an incision. Giving or getting.

You've never known if she loved him back. You're certain she married Curly to try to get him out of the draft as a favor to Tim, and you're certain she and Tim were an item the whole time. It was the only thing Two-Bit would talk about for six months. And it's feasible that she got to Tim through Dallas, that somehow that loss brought them together.

(It's also feasible that love is complex and harder to fucking define that you are willing to consider, and also that losing a boyfriend at sixteen is not the lynchpin for every decision a person makes down the line. But what's the fun in thinking about that when instead you can list off her many romances like a sixty year old woman fanning herself on the back porch of her neighbor's house after church? Oh, Dolores, _did_ you hear? My, my, _my._ )

Silence slides around the space between you like loose wood in the back of a truck. You flick your gaze up to the sign and back down again.

"Kind of a lofty goal, ain't it?"

"Hey, somebody's gotta do it," Sylvia says coolly, and pulls the curtain of her disdain around her. If you didn't know before that it was the wrong thing to say, the sudden gauzy barrier between you ought to clue you in.

But what are you supposed to say? Sorry about your husband? Sorry you pity married a Shepard and it still didn't save him?

She steps forward a little, just on the line of light so that the back half of her head is lit up and her face and bangs are shadowed. Oh, Sylvia with her narrow eyes and crooked nose, Sylvia with her ability to pick out your train of thought and derail you spectacularly. Sylvia with that fucking smile, like Dallas is up from the grave for an iota of an instant and leering at you for looking at his girl, and then suddenly he's gone and the girl is just there looking at you, quick and lean and impossible to pin down.

"Hey," she says, "remember that time we had sex in a car, and then you wouldn't make eye contact with me for two years?"

"Shut up," you mutter, because you're a genius of wit and repartee.

"Mm, and how you've matured."

You want to make a break for it, but in the back of your mind Tim is wagging his gun like a puppet shaking its head. No, no.

"Do you know anywhere else she might be," you say to the sign. "Or who I could talk to."

Sylvia sighs heavily. "I guess you could try Buck's again, or the White Tiger, but Tim's been both those places. But people might tell you more shit, I don't know. Might tell you less."

"Thanks."

"Want me to call you if I hear anything else? I still got your number on the note you gave me after that time I, shall we say, exploded your cherry."

She bursts into laughter at the face you make, and hell, that's good enough. You beat it back into the car and pull out into the street, and Sylvia is still cackling there in the lamplight when you drive away.

...

* * *

Hippie joints have never been your thing. The White Tiger belches out a cloud of smoke when you open the front door, and you know it's only a matter of time before the contact high hits, so you might as well get the bar out of the way as fast as possible.

The bar is in the middle of the living room and one of the first things you see when you walk into the giant ramshackle house that is, as best you can tell, Tulsa's answer to a functional commune. There's a spread of cheese and fruit on the bar that has attracted so many fruit flies the haze of smoke above it is spotted like a Dalmatian. Further above that, through a hole in the middle of the ceiling the size of a small horse, you can see dark shapes writhing against each other. Fantastic. Dinner and a show.

The guy at the bar is pretty clean cut, considering his surroundings, and his beard is neatly trimmed. You belly up next to the plate of soft grapes and ask for a beer. Preferably unopened.

He grins. "First time?"

You've heard enough about the place from Soda to feel like you've lived there yourself. "Yeah."

"No alcohol, man. This is a place of peace, and that shit just robs you."

Someone lounging on the couch behind you yells _amen_! You don't turn around. "So what's with the bar?"

"Advice." He folds his hands in his voluminous sleeves and grins wryly. "What's on your mind, my child?"

Felony misdemeanors, mostly. You wave a cloud of flies and smoke away from your mouth. If the cops raid this place in the next ten minutes you are going _down,_ and you can't even blame them.

"Lookin' for a girl named Angela Shepard. I heard she might be here."

"Might's a funny word," says the very high young man in front of you. "Strength or possibility. Force or uncertainty. You ever think about that?"

"Yes, constantly." Your voice is an eyeroll that would fry the enthusiasm of the average person into a blackened crisp, but this young gentlemen is entirely unaffected. He gives you a beatific look that reminds you of nothing so much as Soda, who is probably somewhere in the building, come to think of it. The thought plants a seed of a headache between your eyes.

You push off the bar and turn to head up the stairs, because what the hell, it's not like anyone's going to stop you, when you hear the bounding laughter that has always characterized your brother and decide to duck into the closet by the door instead. It's empty except for a tangle of hangers, and while it is not a great idea to shut yourself into a closet in a house full of weirdos, it is preferable to coming face to face unexpectedly with long-haired cross-wearing Bizarro Soda.

Soda came back from Vietnam and found Jesus with a vengeance. When he's not working at the soup kitchen down on South Boulder, he is crusading through the White Tiger trying to convert hippies, with moderate success. His charisma is undiminished, but it's so damn _strange_ having the brother you once saw piss in the mailbox of his high school math teacher talk to you about shaping up and living right. You don't know what to do with yourself when he's looking at you earnestly across the dinner table. You knew war changes people- you read books- but you weren't expecting _this._

So there you are in the closet, avoiding your brother (who you should be celebrating the safe return of, you ungrateful shit) and smothering in smoke, feeling that pleasant absence of anxiety starting to take root in your stomach when the crash happens.

And suddenly you're in an intersection in the snow, dying. Suddenly your hands are over your mouth and-

NO. _Closet. Nineteen years old._ In Tulsa and alive, shut up, it's okay, it was just the horrible shattering noise of two people falling through a ceiling in the middle of sex. They are evidently okay, because the waves of laughter emanating from the living room are nearly unbearable. You press the back of your head against the back of the closet and close your eyes.

Oh, quite a night so far, Dick Tracy. Two panic attacks and no clues. At this rate you'll be dead long before Tim ever gets to you.

Fuck it. You open the door, slide out of the closet, and head upstairs. Soda is in the living room facing away from you, and it's not like he could hear your footsteps over the shrieks of laughter, or like he would turn around if he did.

The first room you get to is empty and unlit. There's a single bare bulb in the center of the room with a pull cord, so you shut the door and turn on the light, and find yourself surrounded by beauty.

The mural spreads across three of the four walls, and it is one of the most intricate and lovely forest scenes you have ever had the pleasure of viewing. It's like being inside a painting by one of the old masters, and you reach out to touch and then stop yourself like you're in a museum, like anyone would care. The western wall has young saplings in the foreground and rolling hills behind, with a small brook in the corner that glistens and shines in the light. It's the kind of thing that should take your breath away, but instead you're breathing deeper than you have in days. Even the air feels cleaner somehow.

You kneel down next to the brook and stare into the distant green of uncultivated hills behind the trees, of birds coming up in a flock out of the grass all at once. (Is this what they dream about? Are all people the same? When your hands touch this wall they surely join a concatenation of hands going back through time and into the future, all touching this wall and thinking _yes, this._ What does that _mean_?)

You sit there for a good ten minutes, just looking, before it catches your eye.

And you can't be blamed for that, really. There are so many eye-catching things in this work, it's no crime to miss a little dark mark near the center of the eastern wall. It's halfway up against a tree. It almost looks intentional. But when you lean in, it's fingerprints. It's a smear of four small fingers in a reddish-brown color that you recognize.

And underneath it, smeared on the wall in that same dried blood, is the word _Angel._


	4. Chapter 4

This is not a clue.

This is not a clue because clues don't just _happen_. That would be insane. It would be insane to think that this is a clue, and you are not insane. You are a nice normal young man with a nice normal future ahead of you and no dark murderous things in your past.

Right.

You put your hand on the bloody handprint. It's smaller than yours, even with the smearing. (Yup, yep, definitely not your hand.) Definitely the hand of a woman who is shorter than you, which does not narrow things down, even considering that you never really hit that Curtis growth spurt with the same genetic vigor that your brothers did.

Angela has always been small. Small and delicate and vicious in that way that only truly breakable people can be. Her hand (her hand, you held her hand, she gave it to you like you were a child) could fit this. But so could Sylvia's. So could a million other women's hands, and how many women have been in this room, and how many of them had a spare moment and a weird trip and a bucket of brownish paint? Dozens, at least. There must be ten hippie girls in the building who call themselves Angel, in between all the Sunshines and Rainbows. This doesn't mean anything. This doesn't mean _anything_.

This means something.

You don't know what. You have a lot of questions, which makes sense, since this is fucking _nuts_ , and you have fantastically limited options for answers. There's the advice guru at the bar, any of a dozen stoners downstairs, and your brother.

 _Fuck._

"Soda!" You open the door and yell down the hall the same way you've yelled a thousand times from your room at home. "Hey, Soda! C'mere!"

"Pony?" For a house this big, you can hear just about everything. Might be all the holes in the floors. You can hear the confusion in his voice just as clearly as you can see him in your head, looking around the room once and then up toward the stairs.

"Pone? Where are you?"

"Upstairs!"

He comes trooping up, just as noisy as he was before Vietnam, and for few seconds nostalgia overtakes you, wraps its skinny arms around your neck and squeezes. Soda clattering in through the window, Steve behind him, full of stories about throwing rocks through school windows and jumping out of alleys to scare other kids. Soda in the moonlight, snoring. Throwing Darry passes he always had to run to catch, even though he could thread a ball through a tire at ten yards.

 _Fuck_. Soda coming in through the doorway and seeing you with tears in your eyes, Soda sweeping his shoulder-length hair out of his face and reaching out to grab your shoulder, half protective, half comforting, the same as it's always been.

(Is it possible, is it just the tiniest bit possible, that somewhere down in your gut the things Tim said and the gun in his hand and the bloody smears on the wall behind you _scared_ you, child of chaos, orphaned son? Scared you like you haven't been scared in a while, scared you like when you were a kid and-)

"Hey, what's up? What's wrong, Pony?" He's squeezing your shoulder too hard, and you know he doesn't mean to, and it doesn't help at all. The ropey muscles of his forearm are too near and so you push his arm away without really thinking, and you see the pain slash across his face. But only for a second. Only for a second.

 _Fuck._

Third time's the charm. You close your eyes. "This is gonna sound crazy, but it isn't, and I'm not on anything. Do you know if anything happened here yesterday? Like anybody got hurt, or cut, or anything?"

"No," he says soothingly, and you can tell he doesn't believe you. "Nobody got hurt, kiddo."

The compassion in his eyes infuriates you. Before Vietnam, he would have believed you. Before Vietnam he would have ripped you a new one just for being in this house, but this Soda, golden-haired and handsomer than any picture you've ever seen of Jesus, just smiles gently like that's going to reassure you that it's only a bad trip. This too will pass, my son. Sweet little lost lamb, why worry?

It takes everything you have not to punch him.

You push your back up against the wall like you can sink into the forest and forget about all this.

"No," you say firmly. "Quit it. I'm not tripping, or whatever. I'm looking for-"

And oh _boy_ , did you ever not think this through. Let us take a moment to do so now, shall we?

1\. If Tim Shepard was willing to drag you into an alley and threaten to shoot you, he's probably willing to shoot Soda when he barges in to save your dumb ass.

2\. Soda might also try to save Tim's dumb ass while he's at it.

3\. Tim will _definitely_ shoot him.

4\. If Angela Shepard was here, if she was here and she was bleeding, it would only really matter if it was last night or yesterday, wouldn't it? For your purposes, at least. And if Soda wasn't here last night or yesterday, or was and doesn't know, you need to ask the people downstairs. And you need to get rid of him before that, or he's going to figure out what you're doing. And then get shot.

5\. You definitely didn't think this through.

"Pony," Soda says gently, "you don't gotta lie to me. There's nothing you could do that I wouldn't forgive."

You cannot help but wonder if this includes smacking him in the face. "Soda, come on, I-"

Oh, what the hell.

"I was high, and I had this thing where- where I got real anxious. Not acid, but I smoked this joint and I got real anxious and couldn't do anything, and I thought this room would calm me down, but I kept thinkin' something bad happened in here," you say, quivering your lip at him, and he pulls you in for a hug, which you endure with the aplomb of a truly great actor. Look out, Olivier. Here comes Curtis.

"No, nothin' bad happened," he says quietly. "You're ok, kid. You remember when we were kids and mom used to read us that chapter out of Philippians? Don't be anxious about anything, but in every situation present your requests to God. Every situation, you hear that?"

It would be impossible not to, as you are standing right in front of him. Soda is doing that thing where he fills up a room with his calm and confidence, and this might be the first time in your life that it has not worked. Also his life. Also the history of the world. Hear ye, hear ye: on this date, in this very house, the magic failed.

You nod and clear your throat. "I really think the only way for me to feel better is to ask everyone downstairs if anything happened up here, one by one. Alone. By myself, so I don't get anxious again."

Hoo doggie, someone tell Olivier his title remains safe after all.

Soda blinks at you, and for a second it looks like he's going to call bullshit, but then the velvet of his brown eyes comb you over and come up believing.

"Yeah, ok, buddy," he says and you could swear to God there is a hint of something in those words that does not buy this and _knows_ you're up to something, but it's surely wishful thinking on your part. He looks earnestly down at you, and you look earnestly back at him, and there's so much earnesting going on that it makes you sick. Disgust bubbles up in your throat and you (child of chaos, throwing up in the moonlight) force it back down.

And you know you should be worried about Angela, but with Soda there in front of you all you can think is: how did all this pain begin? When did the brother you told everything, the person you trusted most in the world, become a stranger? When did things turn so _awkward_ between the two of you?

(You know when.)

"Ok," you say back, because what else is there to say? "Ok. Thanks."

And you leave him standing there alone in the painted woods.

...

* * *

To say the hippies were helpful would be untrue, though the Advice Guru did tell you to grow your hair out, so there is that. To say the hippies answered your basic questions would also be untrue. According to everyone in the living room, no one had ever gotten hurt in the Painted Wood, because it is a holy place where you go to have the best journeys this side of paradise, though some of them did say you can have better ones down by the river if you do it right. These two roads diverged into the yellow woods of philosophical arguments that mostly consist of very detailed descriptions of acid trips, and you took the door less traveled by right in the middle of the discourse. And that made all the difference, at least in regards to the budding desire to rip your own heart out of your chest and throw it at the wall.

(Stressed? You? Nooo.)

It's almost three in the morning when you pull up outside your house, headlights already off, 8-track murmuring Hank Williams at you like you're supposed to empathize. The light in the kitchen is on, which is no surprise, because Mary Maxine likes to paint at night.

Everyone knew Darry had a girl out in Cushing for years, but the marriage came as a surprise to you all. You still don't know exactly when they started dating, but it was serious enough during your senior year of high school that Darry refused to talk about it. Soda kept trying to get him to ask the girl to move in, but Darry never was one for living in sin. The summer you graduated, he introduced you to Mary Maxine the week before your birthday, and then went to the courthouse to get married the week after.

And really, it's been two years and it should no longer be a surprise to walk into the kitchen and see a woman at the table, but somehow in the time between your parents deaths and Darry's marriage, the house had become a womanless zone in your mind. It was like they would simply melt into nothing if they tried to enter, like the stench of boys and grease and burnt pancakes combined to create a magic that dissolved them like acid.

Somehow you keep expecting to wake up and find her gone. (Dead? No, nope, _don't mine that rock, buddy, them's goblins down there._ You read a book once where goblins lived underground and could only be scared away by rhymes, which always struck you as deeply hilarious.)

It's been two summers of the birds shrieking you awake every morning only to find Mary Maxine already up and painting, so it shouldn't be a shock to find her at the kitchen table this late, prepping a canvas in shades of green, but you have a fantastic ability to find the mundane surprising and the horrific mundane. (If you were a superhero your name would- no, shut up, come on.)

"Hey there, sunshine." She doesn't look up when you enter. Her short brown hair brushes her chin as she tilts her head down toward the canvas, and for a moment you stand in the doorway, tired and awkward and wondering if you should just go to bed.

But then she looks up and grins, and you're reeled in just as surely as carp on a line. You sit down at the table across from her, and Mary Maxine pushes a plate of apple slices toward you. Just like the only other woman who ever sat at this table used to do.

"You look beat. What's wrong?" says Mary Maxine, who is not afraid of anything. Not sarcasm, not nasty answers, not looking dumb by asking the wrong question, not even Darry's anger. (Ok, perhaps 'anything' can also be defined as 'things you have always been afraid of.') Envy knocks you toward saying something mean, but you bite your tongue until the desire passes.

"Nothing," you say. "Nothing's wrong. I just ran into Soda, is all."

"Ah," she says calmly. "And were you successfully lectured into reading Galatians?"

You smirk at her, and she smirks back. Mary Maxine and Soda like each other plenty, but her beef with him was his sudden inability to leave well enough alone about womanly roles according to the bible. Soda's problem with her is that she has more bible verses memorized than anyone else alive, and so when he would start about women she would inundate him with verses about not eating pork, and how men disgrace themselves with long hair, and a bunch of other arguments about the bible not being consistent about everything that always made a lot of sense to you.

There was a brief period where dinner arguments got so heated that Darry told Soda to knock it off or quit coming back. Soda knocked it off.

Mary Maxine looks up from her painting. There's a smudge of dark green on her cheekbone. You wonder if she's painting a forest.

"Hey," she says briskly, "I never did ask you about that screenwriting class you took. How was that?"

"Good. I'm still working on some stuff from it. Just on my own." It was an interesting class, and you're about to go into all the reasons why, when suddenly a tiny fart of an idea comes rumbling through your stomach, and without thinking you decide to squeeze it out.

"Hey, If you were in a movie where a girl went missing, and you found a bloody handprint with her name under it, what would you do?"

She laughs. Distant leaves bloom under her steady hand. "Not sure. Can't go to the cops, because they never do shit anyway, and also that's no fun. No other blood in the room? Just the handprint? Am I good at looking for stuff?"

"Yeah," you say, which is perhaps not the most honest, but as the other option is going back with a fucking magnifying glass and hunching around the White Tiger looking for other clues, you stick to it.

"I guess if there's no other blood or anything, and no fresh holes around that could be graves or whatever, I'd assume it was a plant of some kind."

Interesting. "Who would plant it?"

"Whoever took the girl," she says slowly, like you're simple. You scrub a hand over your eyebrows.

"No one took the girl. Her family doesn't have any money."

"People don't take girls for the money. They take them because they're sickos."

No no no no no no no. No. You put your head down in your arms and breath in until the scent of oily paint and turpentine begin to calm you down. _No._

"Ok," your voice is steady. "Sure, but I don't think that's what happened. I think this girl just left. She's that kind of girl, the kind that would just leave out of nowhere."

Is she, o omnipotent one? _Is she_ , o you who are privy to the innermost thoughts of women? _Is she_ , _you arrogant fucker, is she really, or are you just too fucking scared to think about something for a minute that women think about all the absolute fucking time?_

"She's ok."

IS SHE

"She's just missing."

IS. SHE.

(Oh, _oh_ , if _only_ Sylvia was here, if only Angela was in the room and the clean line of her knife could open your torso and all the cowardice could fall right out. If only.)

"Well, I don't know, then," says Mary Max. "Maybe you should go to bed, though, man. It can't be good to fall asleep around all this paint." You have always appreciated that Mary Maxine never picked up your brothers habit of referring to you exclusively as 'kid.' You have always appreciated that she is taller than you, and sometimes you can pretend she's old enough to be your aunt. You're an appreciative guy. You appreciate everything.

You slump your way back to your room and go to bed. And you dream of Angela Shepard on a swing in a forest, the palms of her hands wet and red.


	5. Chapter 5

You're up again at six, before the sun gets too high and the sidewalk too hot. The house is silent. You leave the front porch at a dead run.

It's been so long. It burns so much, but you love that burn, that deep in the lungs anger that lets you know that your body thinks you're going too fast, but you know that you're not. You know that as long as your legs will keep going, there is no _too fast_.

You forgot somehow how much it really does hurt, though. Your quads are screaming by the fourth block, and you stop and stretch until it dies down to a whimper and then take off again. You pass Bob Jordan's house, then the house of your old high school math teacher, then the place where Curly fell off the pole and Marie Toller screamed at him. Curly just laughed.

Would Angela have laughed? Does she (did she) have that thing that all Shepards seem to have, that thing makes them laugh genuinely in the face of other people's anger?

She laughed in the park. She laughed while she was swinging.

(Were you angry, in the park?)

You wrack your brain for the deeper meaning behind what you can remember of the interaction you had with her, searching for a philosophical sentiment of a clue, for a sign that she was going somewhere or doing something that only you would know. But there's nothing. It was just a weird ten minutes in a park with a girl who used to hate you, and then a weirder twenty in a bar. It meant nothing. No information changed hands.

And you know you should be broiling with fury that Tim would have the gall to put this on you. You know that. But somehow it feels- it feels a little bit like running, the way it hurts but it's fun because you're _going_ somewhere, finally, after all that waiting, and if you get there first you win.

You wonder if Tim is going to kill you quickly, or if he'll draw it out.

Your legs are on fire. In your memory, Coach Scott laughs. _Runnin' hurts. Get used to it._

You go harder. You run until you can barely feel it, until your muscles settle and stretch and the pain subsides to the back of your mind.

Up ahead coming out of an alley, two Shepard- if they still call themselves that- guys slump against the wall of a hair salon, just coming off the edge of a bender from the looks of it. As Shepard members they've been on the perimeter of your acquaintance for years, but the best you can do is John Something and Something Benson.

You know it's a long shot. And you know it's a stupid shot. Two on one is bad odds, no matter what the movies show. But you have to take every chance you can if you're going to get out of this alive. So you stop in front of the mouth of the alley and nod to both of them. They nod back as one.

"Y'all seen Angela?"

They turn their heads to look at each other and then back at you, and then a tiny sneer appears on both of their faces. You immediately dub them John Benson, the amazing two-bodied dickhead.

"Who wants to know?"

"Tim."

"Fuck Tim," says the one on the left. They both laugh.

"Okay, me, then."

"Fuck you too," says half of John Benson, which you were kind of expecting, but the other half was not. Shocked at this display of wanton independence, he turns to the other and elbows him roughly.

He turns back to you. "What's it worth to ya?"

You put one foot off the sidewalk to stretch your aching calf.

"I look like I got cash, man? I'm just askin' if you seen her." You can hear yourself doing that thing where you slip back into your deepest Okie grammar around people who are already usin' it. Yee haw, son, you seen that little Shepard filly tartin' around here?

John Benson does not have a response to the obvious statement that you have no money. It takes them a moment to think of something else to say, but finally one comes out with:

"What you want her for?"

"Nothin'. Just lookin'."

"Sounds like bullshit to me," says the one on the left, "seein' as we don't even know you."

"We don't hold with Shepard no more," says the other.

The right one pushes himself off the wall, swaying a little, just drunk enough to be dangerous. Great. You're about to get jumped for what, the nine millionth time in your life? Boredom slides down your throat and into your belly. This is going to take _forever_.

Well. There are other options. You can't take two at once, especially when they're clearly carrying blades and you don't have so much as a ring. (Dallas could rain hell with that clunky class ring of his.) You could make a run for it and be marked chicken.

And you wait for that old screaming protest to start up in your head, but time outside of Tulsa and away from all this bullshit appears to have changed your internal tune.

You turn and bolt.

They follow for a good block or so, wheezing and pounding. The one tries to cuss you out while running and falls further and further behind, but the other one is silent. He means business. But it's almost laughable how quickly you outrun them. It's barely a challenge at all.

Once they're out of sight you slow your pace some and think about what John Benson said about not holding with Tim anymore. That was the one thing that surprised you about that entire little scene. You would have thought that they would be begging Tim to come back.

There is, you must admit, something magnetic and vaguely mythical about the Shepards that seems to draw followers. Tim is the vengeful war-god, Curly (was) the deity of wine and mischief. Giuseppina, the mother, always struck you as watery and temperamental, a beached Poseidon stuck in a landlocked town. You always thought of Angela as a two bit Venus, ready to burn the world down if she wasn't chosen as the fairest of them all. But now you think maybe she's Artemis, moonlit and wild. Now you think you never had any idea at all who or what she was (is).

(She's not dead. She can't be. Because if she's dead, you've been dead for hours. You're just a corpse jogging the city streets, looking for a reason to lay down and quit.)

Curly's dead, though.

The thought stops you in your tracks. Curly, who was supposed to grow up and go to jail and change his life and get a job, and have some kids and a wife and be happy. Curly who was supposed to keep throwing pebbles at the back of your head to get your attention and piss you off in gym.

You didn't cry when you heard.

You're not crying now.

You put your head back and link your hands behind your neck, and one of the cars whizzing by catches your eye because it looks a lot like your old red Ford, but there's no reason to think it is, and it doesn't stop. Darry would have stopped and jumped out and called you a bonehead for running through this part of town, even though he wouldn't really mean it. Or maybe he would. You've never been great at telling the difference.

Maybe it's the sight of the Ford, because Curly drove a Ford. Maybe it's all those thoughts about what you would have wanted to happen to him, if it was up to you. Hell, maybe it's the morning air. But the idea blooms up like a flower in the night, sudden and unexpected, and your heart starts to pound again.

You walk to the edge of the road and stick your thumb out for a ride.

...

* * *

The shotgun house where Curly used to live, way out behind Buck's, is still occupied by his best friend. Ernie Kopp and Curly Shepard were Soda and Steve level friends, only they never grew up and moved away and went to college out west. They lived in the same house until Curly got drafted, and the word is that ever since the news came, Ernie's been drinking non-stop. As the news came a few months ago, you imagine he's in pretty rough shape by now.

You imagine correctly. When you knock on the door, which is open- the screen door is hanging by a hinge, a piss-poor defense against the flies buzzing through it- there is a moan from inside. You take that as an invitation and find Ernie in the kitchen, flat on his face behind a refrigerator that has been shoved away from the wall, presumably for repairs.

You can tell Kopp recognizes you, but you barely recognize him. It is extremely difficult to reconcile the scene before you with the guy who once started a band of hoods that he and his brother fronted, called Kopps and Robbers. (Of course, it is equally hard to remember Curly on the drums, because the racket he made was worse than anything that ever came out of any other basement or garage in Tulsa. When it came to volume over talent, Curly was king of them all.)

"Hey," you begin quietly, because Kopp looks like death on a stick and is clearly about two minutes from throwing up whatever he's been ingesting. "Can I get you-"

"No," he slurs at you, and closes his eyes. He shifts around a little, like he's settling into blankets instead of linoleum and wires. "Back."

He waves slightly toward the back of the house, where you assume Curly's room is. So you leave him to it and head back there, passing a plethora of band posters that are just barely hanging on the walls, or already on the floor. Keith Richard's face has a footprint on it.

You don't know quite what you're expecting when you push open the door to the last room in the house. You cannot for the life of you remember what Curly's bedroom at his parents house looked like, and it's even harder to imagine how he chose to decorate at eighteen. But you're not expecting the gun.

(Stupid.)

It's a .44 magnum. You know that. You've seen enough to know that. It's pointed at your chest, which means business, because even head shots are iffy at close range. Apparently you're not the only one who knows that.

Your hand is still on the doorknob. Her finger is on the trigger. Right up against it. Ready.

"Get the fuck out of here, Ponyboy," says Angela.

But instead you shut the door.


	6. Chapter 6

You are beginning to wonder if there is some invisible sign on you that only Shepards can see. That reads, perhaps, Danger: Please Consider Shooting.

Angela's hand is not wavering at all. You don't know why you were expecting it to. Her hair is not blowing back off of her face and she's not wearing some red silk gown, either, and you're not on a cliff at midnight, there, Lord Byron, so why don't you just take a moment to focus on the problem at hand.

It would help if your chest wasn't throbbing with terror. If it didn't feel worse than running fifteen miles. If it didn't feel like you're going to die, or at least faint. (Well, that's an original to get out of getting shot.)

"Fuck, Angela," you mutter, not quite able to get out the _I think I need to sit down_ , but she sees it in the paleness of your face, in the sweat beading above your eyebrows.

She smiles. There is something painful in it. "Open that goddamn door and get out of here, and you won't have nothin' to worry about."

You lean forward and put your hands on your knees, trying to catch your breath, but it's running ahead of you, laughing.

"Can't. Tim'll kill me," you rasp out, and evidently this is the wrong thing to say, because Angela sweeps her dark curls back and laughs that fucking Shepard laugh.

"I'll kill you," she says softly, and you both know she is not lying. "I've had enough men tellin' me what to do to last a thousand years. Open your mouth and tell me to go home and I will put a bullet in your skull."

Behind you, the door opens. You don't have it in you to turn and look.

"I'd ruther you didn't," says Mary Maxine, "as a personal favor to me."

You pivot, hands still on your knees, and find yourself looking up into the extraordinarily calm face of your brother's wife. Your hands squeeze harder, just to make sure you are not dreaming, and the pain that shoots up your leg assures you that you are not.

"Who the fuck are you?" Angela snaps, reasonably enough.

"Mary Maxine." She takes a step into the room so that she's standing beside you and rests a light hand on your back, but she never takes her eyes off of Angela's face. It's like you're not even there.

"You don't look like no nun."

"Little Sisters of the Bellbottoms," says Mary Max, and Angela snorts. As she does, blood begins to slide down out of her nose in one narrow stream. She reaches up with her open hand and wipes the blood with her palm.

(Wet and red. Are you dreaming? You can't be dreaming. You can't breathe.)

"Kind of a rough look," Mary Maxine says coolly.

"The fuck do you know? Anyway, I quit. I'm through with drugs, and I'm through with this fuckin' town, and if either of you so much as think of callin' for-"

"Fuck that," says Mary Maxine, and the sound of that word coming out of her mouth stills you. You have never heard her swear, not like that. That's a word nice girls don't say.

It stops Angela too. She lets the gun fall slightly, so that it's pointing at your feet instead of your chest, and somehow that scares you worse, which you did not think was possible, but you are reaching all kinds of new heights here in Curly's dirty bedroom with clothes strewn all over the floor.

"Fuck what?" Angela says warily.

"Fuck calling someone to stop you, but also fuck just packing up and leaving with no plan. You got a plan? No offense, but if you don't, your chances of ending up back where you start are pretty good."

For a second it looks like Angela is going to lunge at her, but then she deflates. "I got money. That's better than a plan."

"Sometimes." Mary Maxine folds her arms across her chest and leans back against the peeling wall. "I got a friend who runs a bookstore in Kansas City. Got a real cute little apartment above it. I talked to her on Tuesday, and she's lookin' for help. I bet I could get you that job, if you want it."

"I'm gonna go out west," says Angela, wiping at the blood again. It smears across her cheek, monstrous and sick. Like something bit her. You look away.

"I don't got any friends offerin' jobs out west," Mary Max says, shrugging. "But suit yourself."

"I do." Angela's voice reminds you of a dog in a corner, unable to believe the person coaxing it out. Teeth bare and ready.

Mary Max just waits. It's silent, way out here in the country, with no cars screeching by and no radios blasting. It's so quiet you can hear your own breathing, ragged and painful, and when you shut your eyes colors begin to bloom.

When Angela finally speaks, it fills up the room, even though her voice is quiet.

"Why are you helpin' me?"

"Because I wish someone had helped me, when I needed to get out," says Mary Maxine, and you are suddenly struck by the knowledge that she's twenty five, a good seven years older than Angela, and also that you don't know anything about anyone.

"And it's a good scene," she goes on. "Safe, clean. Far enough away."

"You'll call her?" Angela sounds like a child asking for her mother. It's too much. It's all too much. You sit down on the floor, down on top of the old blue and gray flannel that Curly wore the hell out of, and lean your head back against the door jamb.

"You put the gun away, and I'll call her."

The palms of Angela's hands are wet and red. She sets the gun down beside her and reaches out to Mary Maxine, who does not so much as hesitate. She takes her hand. They shake on it.

You didn't know women did that.

When you look up at Angela the goddess is back, bloody and smiling, white teeth under red lips.

This was not how this was supposed to go. You were supposed to be the hero. She was supposed to be scared. You were supposed to save her and then feel better and full of purpose and like maybe it all hadn't been a senseless waste after all. Maybe all that death and darkness prepared you for something. Johnny died but Angela didn't and you're a hero after all. That's how it was supposed to go.

But now they are looking at you, both of these women that you do not understand, and Mary Max is offering a hand- her clean hand- up, and Angela is sitting back on the bed and the sun coming in through the window highlights her black, black hair.

"Did you write your name in the Painted Forest?" You ask her, as Mary Max helps you to your feet.

"Yeah," Angela says, "to say goodbye." She pauses, cocks her head so that her hair brushes her collar bone. "You know about that, Pony? About saying goodbye to shit that's holdin' onto you?"

(A fountain sings sweetly in the moonlight. Your feet are so hot you could be on fire, but you stand there burning, looking. Remembering.

Do you get in?)

"No," you say quietly to Angela, "but I think I'm startin' to learn."

She nods. Mary Max gets her phone number. And then the two of you walk out of the house together into the morning light.

...

* * *

"I saw you guys pass me," you say as Mary Maxine shuts the door to the truck. Soda's in the driver's seat and you're in the middle, pressed up against his shoulder as you try to give her an inch of space.

"We circled back," says Mary Max, and at the same time Soda says, "Yeah, we followed you cause you were actin' so weird last night."

You scowl, but it's too awkward to turn your head and make a point of it, so you scowl at the windshield instead. Air whips at your face as Soda roars out into the road. All the windows are down, and for a second you pretend it's just a normal summer drive on a normal summer day.

"So that's the missing girl, huh? I like her," says Mary Maxine, who apparently has yet to meet a feral animal she wasn't willing to adopt.

"What the hell do the Shepards have to do with all this?" Soda demands. "Were you actually high the other night? And where's Tim? I know you didn't wander into Curly's house without him bein' involved somehow."

You don't reply to either of them. Your vision is blurring a little at the edges, but you can't make yourself lift a hand to give it away. You can't.

Soda pulls over the side of the road and kills the engine, maybe in response to a signal that you did not intend to give, maybe just for the hell of it. You shut your eyes rather than look at the trees up ahead and lean your head back to get a deeper breath.

"Hey," Mary Max says softly. "You all right?"

"I'm scared of everything."

It wasn't supposed to come out. It's not one of those things you say out loud, except to Irv in the middle of the night when he's too drunk to remember, when you're alone in your bed in the darkness and scared of the noises down the hall. It's a secret.

So why does it feel like relief, to finally say it out loud?

And you wait. You wait for the _no you're not, you saved those kids_ or the _all that matters is actions_ that you've been getting from your brothers and Two-Bit for years, but when you look at her Mary Maxine only looks back with those honest eyes and says, "Of course you are."

Like it's the simplest thing in the world. Like it's nothing to be ashamed of.

" _What_?" It's just a whisper, so small you can barely hear it, but she does.

"Of course you're scared of everything," says Mary Max, and you can feel Soda nod on the other side of you. "All y'all are. Your parents died so suddenly, and then two of your good friends did too. You came to tragedy so young that the only things that make sense is if you're scared of everything or angry at everything all the time, underneath all your other emotions, I mean."

"Do you think it will last forever," you hear yourself rasp out, in between those breaths that don't feel like they're doing any good. It sounds like a plea. It sounds like begging.

"I think it'll last until it changes. You're scared underneath, Darrel's mad underneath. Soda went through a change. I'm not saying you have to do exactly what he did- I'm sayin' he's worked through something you two haven't, yet. And that's okay."

Tears leaking. Betrayal. Pain. _I'm sorry._ Your hands on your eyes, pressing. "It doesn't feel okay."

"No, shit like this never does," she says softly. "But that's okay too."

"Soda," you gasp.

And you wish you could say a hundred things, things like, I need help but you can't give it to me, even though you could in the past; things like, I'm sorry I made you responsible for all my terror when I was a kid; things like, why does it have to be this way why does it still burn inside me like a twisted iron why did Johnny have to WHY WHY WHY

Things like: am I ever going to be any better?

"I know," he says. And you believe him. He puts a hand on your shoulder, light and easy and earnest as hell, and you believe him.

And then, in response to the question you cannot ask: "Yeah, kid. Yeah."

And for some reason, some little light rising in a darkness of a reason, you believe that too.


	7. Chapter 7

Tim is much easier to find than his sister.

You're back at Rolly's, which is so much worse in the daytime than it ever has been at night. As soon as you open the door a wave of cold darkness rolls into your chest, and you hold in a cough and step inside. He's at the bar, same chair he was in last night, and for a moment you wonder if any of it was real.

Sylvia laughs in your memory. Yeah, no such luck. It was real.

You can't help but wonder about Sylvia, if she knew where Angela was all along, if she still talks to her at all. They were always together in high school, bending toward each other in the hallways, sharpening their laughter on the backs of whoever walked by. What does it take to break up a friendship like that? What does it take to never break it at all?

Soda, waiting in the truck outside, would be able to tell you. But you don't want to ask, really. You just want to finish this crazy ass quest and go home and watch TV, listen to your brothers bicker in the kitchen, listen to the crickets bickering outside the window.

Rolly's is a hole. You know this is not the last time you'll slide down in it, but you also know, in the same thought, that there will be a last time. And that thought comforts you.

Tim doesn't look around when the door opens, of course, so you walk up next to him and put your forearms on the bar, which is a mistake, because it's sticky as hell. You pull them up again quickly, and Tim deigns to turn his head toward you, you lucky thing, before looking away again.

"I found her," you say without preamble.

"Who?" says Tim.

"Anne of Green Gables, you dumb fuck." _Shit._ "Shit. That wasn't supposed to be out loud."

Tim's laugh is throaty and horrifying, like metal dragging on asphalt. Sparks in the air. Your luck (well, not _your_ luck, since it appears to be good, but perhaps someone else's luck) is truly with you, because from all possible angles he doesn't look even a little pissed, or even a little drunk. He just looks like you made a joke.

You take it.

"Sorry." This is untrue. You are not even slightly sorry. "Anyway, I found her." This part is true. You did in fact find Angela. Accidentally? Sure, but it's not like Tim has the power of omniscience.

His long fingers drum once against the bar, the only indication that he heard you at all. If it is that.

You wait. And after a while, those awful eyes move toward you, on you, up and over and away again. And a breath you didn't mean to hold slips out.

"And?" says Tim.

"And she's leaving." Somehow, it is not in you to tell him where. Maybe it's that courage the newspaper kept howling on about when you were a kid; maybe it's that stubbornness Darry always found in your every move. But fuck Tim if he thinks you're going to blow Angela's chance to get out on _him._

But you think of Mary Maxine, and something like compassion turns over inside you. So you add: "She's got a job set up, though. A real job, a good one."

Tim does not respond to this revelation. He doesn't even turn and look in your direction. He takes a drink, sets it down, stares at the mirror over the bar. You turn to meet his eyes in the glass.

"I guess you're as smart as he always said you were," he says after a minute.

And what would you have given, in another life, for Tim Shepard to praise your intelligence? What would you have done, in the absence of your own brothers, to gain the approval of this man?

But it's nothing to you now.

"Look," you begin without knowing the ending, only that it's somewhere in between _fuck you_ and _be better_ and _let's get out of here_ and _I am so sorry about your brother._

But maybe Tim is omniscient after all, because he grins at the mirror and shakes his head, just once, and you shut your mouth.

He lights up, which you take as dismissal, but he raises an eyebrow at you just before you turn to leave and you stop.

"Buck up, kid," he says around a mouthful of smoke. "It's a brand new day."

It's four in the afternoon. You suspect he knows this.

"You okay, Tim?"

There must be an invisible sign on Shepards that only you can see. That reads, perhaps: Not Okay. Please consider asking about, even though that's stupid.

Tim smiles. It's just as bad as you remember.

"Give you to the count of ten to beat it," he says languidly, but you know the absence of malice in his voice does not mean an absence of malice behind it. Still, you wait eleven seconds before walking out the door, and that stranger's luck must still be behind you, because you can still hear him laughing all the way out onto the street.

It's a bad sound, a sick sound, but it doesn't echo in your ears the way it would have last week or last month or even last night. It doesn't stay with you. You get in the truck, Soda drives you home, and soon- so soon you can hardly believe it- you're in front of the TV with Mary Max, watching Carol Burnett dance around and listening to Darry and Soda argue about how much sauce to use for the spaghetti. Outside, you can hear a single cricket talking to itself, but you know soon there will be more. Enough to fall asleep to on a calm summer night.

...

* * *

The moon is out this time. You look up and there it is, hanging low and full and more beautiful than it has any right to be.

Your feet are hot. You bend down and take off your shoes, hold them in your hands like a priest holds bread. You look around, but the swings are empty. The park is empty. You're alone.

You do not move toward the water.

When you first started coming here and wading in the fountain, it felt like freedom. It felt like giving the drowning boy inside you the choice to survive, to step out dripping of his own free will.

It does not feel that way anymore. Now it feels like a river in a story, singing you in, beckoning. But every time you heed it you lose something you can't name or quite catch hold of, even in your mind.

It feels like you can't stop stepping in and out of a memory in a way that is not, at this point in time, doing you any good.

The knowledge that has been growing inside you for a while now is blooming up into a strange little self, a gray-green thing with gold at the edges. And as corny as it feels- as corny and real and profound as it feels- to admit it, you're glad.

You think of Angela's blood on the wall of that house, her name written boldly beneath it.

You think of Johnny and Bob and Dallas and Curly, of a hundred boys in a jungle, of a chance you got that not everyone gets. You think of your parents backlit in the doorway of your bedroom, smiling down at you while you pretend to sleep.

The fountain whispers. But inside you, something has unfolded, and you will not fold it up again.

You bend down and put your shoes back on. Your feet are hot, but it's summer. It's all right. It's supposed to be this way.

You turn and walk away from the fountain, out onto the moonlit sidewalk, and back toward home.

Healing takes a long time, and it hurts, but it's coming. It's coming.

You can feel that down in the muscles of your chest. Down in the very bone.


End file.
